Économie Zombie

The French edition of Zombie Economics, published by Editions Saint-Simon, will be out early next year. French is the only language other than English that I can read reasonably well, so it will be very interesting for me to see this edition.

A French edition may be appropriate as wasn’t it the French Physiocrat Economics that started the thread of economic theory (confusion) that has finally brought the whole world to the brink of catastophe?

The Physiocrats were an improvement upon the Mercantilists. Mercantilism placed an emphasis on (unequal) foreign trade, colonialism and the hoarding of bullion which it mistook for wealth.

The Physiocrats, in an agricultural age, saw wealth as coming from the land and produced by agricultural labour. From this basic beginning, the labour theory of value can be traced through Adam Smith and thence to Marx.

The modern heterodox theory of thermoeconomics or biophysical economics could possibly be regarded as a descendant theory of Physiocracy in so much as all “wealth” (resources, good and services) is ultimately derived from the biosphere (the “land” or the earth) via human effort.

I tend to think that it is a separate tradition from the Mercantilists through to modern neoclassical economics that has done the damage.

If you go to the Wikipedia article on mercantilism you realise that modern “neoclassical globalism” sounds much like mercantilism writ large. The modern neoclassical emphasis on “free trade” is pure propaganda, a pretence. Beneath that you find many of the techniques of colonialism, imperialism and mercantilism. Compare the dot point list of mercantilism with what happens today. It’s much the same.